Robert DuSold

I decided to make my first visit in nearly 2 years to a real live movie theater and see the remake of “West Side Story”.

It felt good and weird to be in a movie theater again… wearing a mask, for me, is not an inconvenience… but for something I so cherish.. movies and theater… it felt odd.

Anyway, I bought the original movie for the low, low price of $4.99 on 🍎 and wanted to have it fresh in my mind before I saw the Spielberg 2.0…

So, I watched it on what’s been my personal multiplex for the last 2 years and finished it the day before my neo-virgin adventure to the cinema with a bunch of seats and popcorn and shiz.

I must have seen it as a kid, although believe it or not I was still in diapers when it came out. But seeing it after spending my life in theater, I was so struck by the brilliance of it. Just the raw brilliance of Jerome Robbins and Bernstein and Sondheim and Laurents and Robert Wise. It’s a once in a lifetime marriage of a score and choreography and book and direction.

I’ve come to appreciate structure..a lot.. since developing and performing in and directing musicals. This musical.. and the original film took everything to a new level. They invented a new language.

It’s been copied and” borrowed”from for the last 50 years… I noticed the opening of “Cats” both visually and musically is almost verbatim from a scene after the rumble.. that was a new one for me…and I noticed the choreography from “Bad” in there too, amongst other homages. Let’s call them homages…

There’s not a line of substantial dialogue until about 15 minutes into the original.. but what you get is storytelling through dance and music. What’s magnificent is the story gets into your gut with just that… music and dance.

You see and feel and hear an entr’acte in a film just the same way you would in a theater. The music takes you in. You see NYC taking shape from stick drawings and hear the pulse of the city. The aerial shots are brilliant.. New York City really does look like a concrete jungle. Cars and people look like ants burrowing their way through an ant farm. It looked real, like ugly real. They almost look like cockroaches. Trapped. Trapped in New York City.

You could picture yourself there.

And that, my friends, is what’s missing not only from this reboot, but from our culture now.

We are all dug in so deep in identity and tribalism that it’s nearly impossible at this point to tell a story that’s universal.

First, that whistle. A signal. A warning that you hear at the top of the show. It’s so haunting to me. I felt in the 2.0 it was more of an homage and not used as it was intended.

It’s all there… all of it. The dance and the music and the story in of all times, 1961.

In the 2.0, I saw the storyboard. I saw the shots being set up. I feel like this was a film in search of a musical instead of a musical being filmed. I don’t think you can chalk that up to innovations in filmmaking really.. it’s just not sitting down with a score in a rehearsal room instead of a conference table.

It’s making a movie with the music and dance as secondary characters.

New York City looked more like Beirut to me.. I didn’t get the flavor of the city in this iteration. I didn’t see it. Or feel it. Or think I could maybe be there back then.

The book for the Spielberg film is so oddly heavy that it was more of a hindrance to the story. One line of dialogue from each of the Jets and Sharks in the original gave you a sense of who they are… which is pretty crucial to numbers like “Krupke” and “America” ..for the female characters as well. There should be a playful quality in both of those numbers that just wasn’t there to me, mostly because we haven’t gotten to know the players.

They just seemed sorta random in the new and improved film.

The dance didn’t seem grounded in the story to me either.. I don’t know, Jerome Robbins must have been visited by God or something because he said everything possible through choreography. There were some great dancers in the fresh one as well, but I didn’t get lost in the choreography, I noticed the dancers.

I felt while watching the new one with a few other older peeps in the movie theater that the book tried to explain what the music and dance should have, and I wondered after so much dialogue why it wasn’t on it’s way to being a dramatic film and not a musical.

And there was some really good acting in this new one, and good singing too…by several, Rachel Zegler as Maria was phenomenally good… I’d say able to pull off not only being a star, but a musical star.

But, she’s Colombian and not Puerto Rican, and the dude who played Tony evidently was handsy in junior high and there’s still white men at the helm and…

Yada yada yada.

I long for the days before social media, truly. Even though I wouldn’t get the chance for the two of you who will read this. But the culture police, along with what seems like an overwhelming admonition to love this film was a part of the price of admission for me.

Maybe there’s some nostalgia thrown in there, I don’t know, but I think 1961 looks a lot better.

This new film will never have the cultural impact the original did.. it pretty much bombed at the box office.

I’m not sure what that tells us, but there’s a few lessons in there somewhere…..